


What Once was Given

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: The Ritual (2017)
Genre: F/M, Horror, Mild Sexual Content, Post-Canon, Ragnarok, References to Norse Religion & Lore, canon character death, references to pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:48:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21760078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: “How many of you were there?” The man’s voice sounded strange. He’d never asked about her family before and the witch suspected he wasn’t expecting an answer. Her birdlike eyes flitted towards him across the fire, and after a moment’s pause she made a gesture with her hands which could have been taken as encompassing the whole of the forest, perhaps even further afield. Her face she kept carefully impassive, but she felt the mood shift. He’d glimpsed the other older, abandoned houses, after all, and he must by now have guessed something of what they meant.Their world was dying. It might already be too late.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	What Once was Given

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Selkit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selkit/gifts).



> Please note this story contains some elements from the novel, but there's no need to have read that to understand it.

The worlds were burning. The old witch saw it happen, even as the flames that had torn through the timber building, through cobweb-hair and thrashing limbs as dry as kindling, died back. They left behind a smoking ruin and scorched earth and a smear of grey smoke across a sky the colour of bone.

Later she would watch as the others that were left, outsiders all, sifted through the still-warm remains to pull out one by one the skulls of the dead lost to the flames, but for now the ashes on her tongue were those of the nine worlds. Overhead there was nothing but a sky empty of sun and stars and moon, and the waters were rising. Only the tree remained.

Gradually, she returned to herself. She lost her grip on a vision of a world where the trees were a raging scrawl of fire against the ink-black sky, and slipped back to this other world in which she sat, hunched and broken, at the edge of a blackened circle of scorched earth.

Her swollen joints ached, but even that unending pain dimmed next to the searing agony of her burns, a pain so sweet it brought tears to her eyes. Her nose had been shattered, her left eye so badly swollen she could barely see out of it. That angry, bitter boy: she could understand now why her god saw fit to mark him, why _he_ was chosen.

She’d barely escaped the fire herself. Her left arm was badly burned, her fingers bloody and her nails torn from dragging herself across the smouldering floorboards. She’d stayed huddled low beneath the choking smoke, blind to everything but her fear while the raging heat battered in waves against her back like a rising storm tide.

How sweet, by Odin, did the memory of that all-encompassing fear taste now, when the only emotion she could feel was grief?

Not one thought had she spared for her kin while they were dying. Some of those bodies she’d prepared for the long slumber herself, drawing the damp cloth along naked, shrunken limbs, crooning to them as if they were children and she the mother: the white gleam of an eye fixed on hers; blackened lips drawn back from yellowing teeth; nails snagging on the hem of her woollen dress. It shamed her now, how she’d saved herself without a second thought.

The witch was the last of Moder’s true-born children, the only one who could still remember the old ways. The others that were left were outsiders and outsiders they would always remain, for all that they’d been marked and tested. None of them would lay her out and wash her body when her time had come to sink into the long slumber. There would be no one left to remember.

It was well past dawn when the others began to come creeping back, slipping from the clearing, shame-faced and cringing. It must have been a bitter sleepless night in the forest amongst the trees, not knowing whether they had been allowed to flee, or had simply been overlooked, and by noon no more appeared. Not many: just five left, three men and two women. More might have escaped into the forest, but Moder would not have been in the mood to be merciful.

They circled the ruins, glancing at the trees. Exchanged looks and shaken nods of greeting, the men indulging in a low muttered conversation, eyeing up the witch who had made no indication that she was even aware of their presence. One of the men, braver than the others, hunkered over the corpses trampled by Moder, and lowered his head as if praying, his steepled fingers pressing into his upper lip. The two women huddled together, pale-faced and shaking on their feet.

They all looked like they were regretting coming back. Perhaps they’d never meant to. Perhaps, right up until the last moment, they intended to flee, finding that their lives in the forest and their devotion to Moder were matters that could be set aside at will, and their old lives, the ones they’d thought abandoned, could still be waiting for them to return.

At least until they heard the bellow of a god echoing through the trees and realised what running would mean.

One of the women said something and the man grunted back, rising to his feet. He advanced in a slow tightening arc towards the charred ground. Towards the witch. When she moved, he went still, his eyes flaring wide, as if he’d assumed – or had hoped – that she was dead. Then he offered up a sickly smile and kept coming. He squatted down a little way away from her as if he feared she might try to grab him. He was short and paunchy, his stringy hair matted and filthy from his night in the forest, but he was cleverer than the rest and stronger too.

"I’m sorry about your family," he said, his voice hoarse. And he waited, eyes grim and cautious despite his servile smile. "I can go after him," he continued when the witch made no reply. He leaned forward too eagerly, a brightness in his eyes, although he had at least lowered his voice to a respectful hush. The others couldn’t have heard him, but they exchanged looks.

Had they dreamed out there in the forest, the witch wondered. And if so, of what?

"Say the word and I’ll drag him back here to atone."

He was lying. Even if he didn’t realise it yet. If he went after the boy, he wouldn’t come back. The witch could see it as clearly as if she’d read it in the runes. He’d stumble out of the trees and taste the air free of smoke and sweat and slaughter, and then he’d keep on going and never come back.

And she needed him. Even if she wasn’t certain why yet.

Wordlessly, she held out her hand and let him help her up. The joints of her knees cracked like gunshots. Even hunched as he was, the top of her head barely reached halfway up his chest.

"Well?" he said to her back as she walked past him. "He might fetch help. Others will come."

 _Let them_ , the old witch thought. Their god would deal with whoever came.

Out in the forest, Moder roared. A hollow bellow of anguish, followed by a distant yipping that echoed off the trees. A mother keening for its young. The witch felt the call reverberate in her chest, accompanied by a stab of pain from the old scars. They stung as savagely as if they had been made anew.

* * *

They built a pyre for their dead. Gathered up the remains of the sleeping ones, laying out the bones and skulls one by one on the grass while the witch tried to call their god down. Since that first bellow, the forest had remained silent. Even the wind had gone still, and for a long while it had seemed as if the only sound in the clearing aside from the crackle of the pyre was the witch’s hoarse and reedy voice raised in song. No reply came from the shadowed darkness between the trees. The others had stopped to watch, but when her song fell silent only the man did not look away.

He watched as she cast the runes, and when she left, he went with her.

The enveloping dampness of the forest was a blessed relief after the smell of charcoal and burning flesh and the cold, stark daylight. The acrid smell of smoke pursued them through the trees, but then that was gone, swallowed up in the smells of the damp earth and the moss and rotting mulch that cushioned their feet.

The man was her shadow, following her over rocky outcrops and through tangles of brush, occasionally so close behind her she could hear his shallow breath, his pants and grunts as he struggled through thickets, struggling to keep up. The witch moved with surprising agility and speed despite her height and advancing years, and it was he who fell behind as they crossed gullies, picked their careful way along slippery moss-covered ridges, and through dense tangles of bracken from which rose the scent of wet earth and decay. Even on ancient tracks, he slowed his pace, hesitating at evidence of former inhabitation, the sloping angle of a tumbledown shack. The witch kept going: she needed no memories of better times.

From time to time, the witch stopped to sing Moder down, knowing after the third unanswered call that nothing would come in answer to her call, but it gave the man a chance to catch up, breathless and wheezing, and chastened by his inability to keep to her pace.

Darkness came quickly in the forest, the canopy of the pines shutting out the sky. Perhaps this was the reason why she allowed him to follow her, because when they stopped to camp in the shelter of a rocky outcrop, he built a fire without being asked. Eagerly, as if grateful for something with which to distract himself.

The witch made herself as comfortable as her aching old bones would allow in a tangle of roots and wondered why he had come. 

The tree trunks formed a circle of dancers about them, shadows flickering at the edge of the witch’s vision. Overhead the moon could be glimpsed through the fringed canopy of the trees, spilling its silver light through the branches.

"How many of you were there?" The man’s voice sounded strange. He’d never asked about her family before and the witch suspected he wasn’t expecting an answer. Her birdlike eyes flitted towards him across the fire, and after a moment’s pause she made a gesture with her hands which could have been taken as encompassing the whole of the forest, perhaps even further afield. Her face she kept carefully impassive, but she felt the mood shift. He’d glimpsed the other older, abandoned houses, after all, and he must by now have guessed something of what they meant.

Their world was dying. It might already be too late.

And she watched him as he rubbed his jaw, thinking. Saw the way his sly eyes turned to molten gold with the reflected light of the fire as the thoughts played through his mind. Clever though he might be, he was as easily read as the runes. He was thinking about running again. About taking up a stone and crushing her skull first. Wondering if it would be wise: Moder might not have come in answer to the witch’s song, but sacrifice was a far more potent way to summon a god.

"You should have let me kill him," he finally said, meaning the boy.

She couldn’t be certain he wasn’t right.

* * *

When he dreamt, she saw what he saw. Or perhaps she only saw what anyone would see, dreaming out here in the moonlit forest. The god, standing motionless amongst the trees that both protected it and kept it chained, antlered hands outstretched and eyes burning in the midnight black. She saw awe forcing him to his knees as it had all the others before him, and how he wept, not only at the sight of the god, but also at seeing his life illuminated in a stark and shifting light, at the recognition of how all the moments he’d thought banal and wasted had led him to this sacred act of communion.

How he would have done anything for Moder. _Anything_.

His eyes snapped open and he stared at her through the fire, shaking. He’d shaken then too, she remembered, despite his borrowed courage from the offered moonshine. He’d wept as he made his way up the creaking staircase to the ones waiting in the attic room.

Not many of the outsiders climbed those stairs willingly, even those who came because they recognised Moder’s call singing in their blood, but he had, even if he’d clung onto the banister so tightly his knuckles were white. He went and afterwards had laughed about it with the others, dizzy with joy and the relief of having survived.

All of them as children, playing games. None of them had understood.

She sensed them then, the spirits of all the others that had gone before, as they came slipping through the trees, small and quick and agile, their bare, bony feet making no sound upon the earth. They drew closer, crowding in behind her back, or dancing out of sight beyond the circle of light cast by the fire, using the shadows for cover. Their lifeless breath stirred her hair, and she felt the sensation of spiteful fingers pinching at the air above her skin, never quite making contact. By the frozen expression on the man’s terrified face, she knew they were real.

And they were angry. The air was thick with their fear and fury, and all of it directed at her, the one who had allowed their world, a world which had once stretched the length and breadth of the forest, to shrink away to almost nothing, to a bare handful of outsiders who did not know this world, who should have been fit only to be taken.

This they whispered, the ones who had long since turned to dust, in their voices soft as the rustling of pine needles, the patter of raindrops.

But their world had already been receding long before the witch was the last of them. It had been a long time since _any_ children had been born in this forest, and certainly none in the witch’s lifetime. Their world was already dying.

What more, asked the witch, could she have done?

 _Everything_ , the figures sighed, and then there was a flurry of movement about her like ravens bursting into a sudden flight. The fire guttered like a candle, the flames surging higher before dying back down.

The witch held her breath. The clearing was too silent to be empty. The man gave a low keening groan, and she knew that Moder had arrived.

She opened her eyes.

Moder stood at full height between the trees, most of its flank hidden behind bracken so that the body which it bore aloft as though impaled on horns seemed to hang suspended between the trunks. Bent and splayed by some unseen torment, all twisted flesh and torn muscle, it reached with elongated fingers of antler bone to claw at the branches and up towards the sky.

A familiar sight for the witch, or so it should have been. But it was different seeing her god here in the forest, where Moder was wilder and less predictable, if indeed any god could ever be described as predictable. Neither recognition nor intelligence glinted in the savage eyes that burned in the eviscerated belly of the torso, where dead flesh melted into darkness.

It was the way of gods to be cruel. Even the worshippers of the Christian god knew that. And this was a truth the witch had always understood: Moder owed her nothing, and yet the image returned to her of the worshippers that it had slaughtered on a whim, and how easily Moder could do the same to her.

Slowly, knee joints aching, the witch stood up.

The spines that ran along the ridge of Moder’s hunched back prickled in warning. The witch thought of bodies crumpled on the ground, of skulls crushed beneath lashing hooves. But they had been outsiders, tolerated and graced only with the permission to walk for a little while within its borders. The witch feared her god, yes – only a fool would not – but this was the only life she’d ever known and the only life she would ever know.

A stifled moan. The man was still watching, the whites of his eyes showing unnaturally bright in his filthy face. Frightened, but hiding it, his expression fixed. He wasn’t kneeling, the witch saw with surprise. Unexpectedly, she approved. The others had knelt: it made no difference. Perhaps the time had come to try another way.

Moder moved with another growl of warning, rearing up before the witch and slamming back down hard enough to make the ground shake, planting its gnarled black hooves in the earth before her. Moder’s gleaming eyes fixed on her with an expression of malice and cruelty. A snorted gout of stinking breath enveloped her. The witch did not flinch. She only clucked under her breath, and reached up slowly, aware of the man looking on in horror and fascination as she slipped her hands between naked jawbones and into the stinking shadowed darkness.

In response the arms that hung down from the torso twisted towards her, long dead muscles jumping in spasms. The fingers curled around her cheeks and beneath her jaw. Their touch was firm, but careful, like a man ascertaining the best way to prise an oyster open. Moder was strong enough to twist her head from her shoulders should it choose. The witch didn’t struggle.

She could see the seams where dead human flesh melded into the animal flank, the leathery skin beneath the sparse black pelt, the matted and reeking fur that fringed Moder’s leg joints. And the ragged opening where the pelvis of the body had been torn asunder; this close she should have been able to see what lay inside, but there was nothing there, only those hate-filled eyes glittering like candles held aloft in an ocean of darkness.

How long had it been, the witch wondered, since she last saw any intelligence in those eyes at all?

She had heard Moder speak before, but only ever to demand, and only now, here in this place which is Moder’s true home, did the witch recognise that what she had always taken for the fickle changeability of a god, was in truth merely a mindless and arbitrary lack of purpose. She saw the thing she’d spent her life worshipping as it truly was, not great and wondrous as a god should be, but mindless as a wounded animal, long maddened by its imprisonment. Even gods, perhaps, could lose their way.

Her failure, hers and all her kin, allowing their world to fall back before the shadow of the Christian god, but they were not the only ones at fault. It felt as if they had both been asleep, the witch and her god, the two of them slumbering while their world shrank back around them.

From Moder’s chest came a deep coughing bark. A familiar sound, but it held a bitter note she’d never heard before. It was the sound of a creature that had never before known pain, and its flanks heaved with every panting breath. It was hurt.

She reached upwards, letting her hands sink into that hot damp space, never quite touching flesh but feeling it writhe unseen about her hands, always just out of reach. Moder pressed close, jointed front legs bending as though the god meant to kneel, and the darkness swallowed her arms up to the elbow and still she did not touch flesh. The witch lifted her face, and let the darkness swallow that up too. She plunged into the vision.

She saw the world as it was in the time before, which was then and now and always. She saw the nine worlds, held together by the roots of the Guardian Tree, which would remain after all the worlds had been scorched away by the fire of the sons of Muspell and swallowed up by the rising waters. She saw the Aesir, arrayed in Asgard: the Allfather, his remaining eye burning sly and cold and cruel, and Thor beside him, his hammer Mjollnir slung over his shoulder, and countless others: Sif with her streaming golden hair and Freyja with her necklace displayed across her breasts.

Small and slight as the witch was, none of the gods seemed to see her; they were blind to her presence. All save one.

Moder growled as between the gods came slipping the figure of a man, slender and fine, with eyes that flashed red and green with the ever-shifting light. He was smiling, sly and amused, and the witch knew him for the Trickster, the Father-of-Lies. As she stared at him, he winked.

She saw him again, bound with the entrails of his son and writhing in agony, saw the murder of Balder by his remorseful brother. Saw the Allfather impaled and hanging upon the Guardian Tree as Moder did to the ones it took and the ones it was given. The witch heard his breath beside her ear as he whispered all the secrets given to him through death. She saw Loki’s children – all of them – and they were countless: Sleipnir, to whom he played the role of mother, and his children by the giantess Angrboda: Fenrir and Jormungand and Hel, and all the rest of his bastard children, more than she could count. An army, and each in their own way as great and terrible as Moder.

They were all waiting, imprisoned until Ragnarok. Until the day came when Fenrir would swallow up the Allfather whole, and the World-Serpent Jormungand would at last avenge himself against Thor, and all would have their part to play.

That time was drawing close; Ragnarok was coming.

The witch sensed the moment Moder woke as a sudden flaring inside her skull, a sensation so overwhelming that she cried out in terror and joy. She had thought she knew her god. Only now did she realise how wrong she was. Only now was she allowed to see.

* * *

She was laughing when the man shook her awake, and although he looked scared out of his wits, he was laughing too, tears leaving tracks of startlingly clean skin down his grey-stubbled cheeks. At first she thought he must have seen the vision too, until she heard the words he was repeating over and over again: _We’re forgiven_ , he was saying, _we’re forgiven._

As if a god would give a damn for such a thing. She could have told him it had never been about forgiveness, but the reawakening of a promise that was made long ago, and that they had all been sleeping: not just men, but the gods too, but a time was coming when they would all need to shake off the clinging grip of sleep and the promise would be fulfilled. It was time to take what was owed.

He knelt before her, pressing his forehead against the earth. "Whatever you ask of me," he said, and she guessed then he _had_ come out here with the intention of killing her after all. "It’s yours."

* * *

They had come further than the witch realised.

It would be a long journey back to the house and on the way back they'd once more have to make camp.

By the light of the fire, the witch would take him inside her, slowly, because as ancient as she was, she remained a virgin. And afterwards she'd tilt her head back towards the face of the moon and bury her hands in the soil, and she'd think of the roots of the Guardian Tree which stretched down into the earth to link the three levels of the universe. She'd hear Moder crashing through the forest around them, the sound echoing across the valley so it was impossible to say from what direction it came, and she'd know that despite her age his seed would take root and there would be a child. Perhaps even children.

She'd wonder how it came to be that Moder should be imprisoned here, set to guard this ancient forest where Yggdrasil’s roots burrowed down through soil and bedrock, and where the people at the end of times would hide in the branches of the Guardian Tree and find shelter from the all-consuming flames.

And she’d think of Loki too, the Father-of-Lies, and of how his eyes flashed green at the moment he winked at her, and how he always, _always_ , cheats.


End file.
